Word: sylvia
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...Sylvia Townsend Warner...
...Sylvia Townsend Warner wore the disguise of an English country gentlewoman. These essays of reminiscence that she wrote from 1936 to 1973 seem to be dressed in tweeds and sensible walking shoes, with a faint, agreeable odor of dog hovering above the pages...
...people free from odd compulsions. An otherwise impeccable butler, intolerable to the Warner family because of his ghastly smile, returns as a volunteer fireman to avenge himself with a carefully misdirected extinguisher on the house that rejected him. On an idyllic holiday in Wales, little Sylvia and a friend come terrifyingly close to burying another child in the sand. With chilling serenity the memoirist comments, "Children driven good are apt to be driven...
...piece on folk recipes-a pint of warm beer stirred with a hot poker will cure backache, a slab of raw beef will rub away a wart-the reporter edges deliciously close to magic herself. Even the inventory of the purple velvet handbag of Mme. Houdin, ten-year-old Sylvia's French tutor, becomes a litany of talismans to ward off disaster: smelling salts, two thimbles, a photograph of M. Houdin, the number of madame's life-insurance policy, and "a rather neglected rosary...
...tones of American authors cannot hold a vowel to the loquacious Irish. In 1924 Sylvia Beach, owner of the famous Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris, took James Joyce to the studio of "His Master's Voice" to record the Aeolus episode of Ulysses. Although extremely nervous, Joyce delivered an impassioned reading. The result was a disappointment: the poor quality of the master disc overpowers the author. Later in England, Joyce read the Anna Livia Plurabelle section of Finnegans Wake with much better equipment. His eyesight failing, he read from a huge typescript, although he must have known...